Influenced by - Alfred Binet intelligence testing movement

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1 SA1 Trait Psychology Influenced by - Alfred Binet intelligence testing movement Origins - Psychologists became interested in seeing whether the success achieved with mental measurement might be repeated if one tried to quantify social characteristics Trait theories of 1920s and 1930s friendliness, honesty, conscientiousness, aggressiveness Development of statistical methods to give dimension to these qualities systematically and to quantify them rigorously and carefully Used self-reports and ratings by others and multiple choice or true-false inventories and questionnaires (as shortcuts for the actual sampling of behavior psychiatric interviews) Shift from performance assessment to asking what people are like (situation free) These responses were used not as samples of the respondents relevant behavior but as signs or indicators of their generalized dispositions Conceptual and methodological problems occur if one does not distinguish very carefully between people s subjective judgments about themselves and an objective sampling of what they actually do Allport (1937) used dictionary to compile a list of adjectives (hundreds long) as traits the individual is an amazing stable and self contained system that contains enduring generalized dispositions Other psychologists used factor analysis and other methods to narrow his list down One main objectives is to find a finite and relatively small taxonomy of the basic dimensions of the field of personality and social behavior Temporal stability vs. cross-situational generality or consistency Although behavior patterns often may be stable, they usually are not highly generalized across situations lives have continuity and we perceive ourselves and others as individuals who maintain a stable identity over time, even when our specific actions change across situations

2 The impact of trait psychology has been limited seriously because human consistencies and psychological equivalences are more complex and cognitively constructed than nomothetic trait theory suggests Wittgenstein members of common everyday trait categories do not all share a single set of necessary features for category membership, but a pattern of overlapping similarities (family resemblance structure) Natural semantic categories fuzzy sets Prototypicality view - Organized around prototypical examples of focal stimuli, with less prototypical members forming the continuum away from the central prototypical exemplars Nancy Cantor explores extroverts Limitation Focus is not addressed at the flow of behavior nor in any way linked to the dynamic interactions that go on where people are actually living their lives Focus on between-person differences, between-person variance, rather than on within-person variance as it relates to environmental changes Classifies subgroups or people rather than capturing and explaining the ongoing flow of their behavior Move away from an exclusive person-focus to study the interaction of persons with their worlds in a more process-oriented fashion Kurt Lewin most influential in the discovery of the role of social contexts through his articulation of the field of forces operating in any given situation at the moment Led up to the experimental approach to the analysis of basic processes influencing attitudes and behavior espoused by the mainstream social psychology of Lewin s disciples Birth of psychodynamic approach a way of finding consistencies as they exist for the individual in a way that was not obvious at the level of surface behavior Assert that the relationship between indicators, intrapsychic dispositions, and overt behavior may not be cumulative and additive, as the trait approach assumed The relationship between sign and disposition may be subtle, indirect, and contradictory and may involve all kinds of transformations The psychoanalytic approach provided the notion of transformation the notion that the same motive could manifest itself in all sorts of ways, displaying a wide range of

3 vicissitudes (what people do has to be decoded in terms of what it really means rather than how it merely seems) Failure to validate crucial constructs experimentally Clinical experiences of the 1950s and early 1960s with clients seeking help Psychodynamic personality diagnostics were too often formulated with little regard for the client s own construction of his life and his specific behaviors Problems (phobias, sexual dysfunctions, fetishes) were constructed merely as symptoms and even as manifestations of resistances The total findings of 1950s and 1960s experiments questioned the utility of clinical judgment even when the judges were well-trained expert psychodynamicists working with clients in clinical contexts and using their own preferred techniques On the whole, clinicians assessments of underlying genotype dispositions have not predicted behavior better than the person s own self-assessment, simple indices of directly relevant past behavior, or demographic variables Contemporary Cognitive Social-Learning Approaches Social behavior theory Promised to focus on the client-defined problematic behavior in its context rather than on the clinician s inferences about the symptomatic meaning of that behavior as a sign of generalized dispositions or psychodynamics Behavioral discontinuities People change as the conditions of their lives change and these changes are genuine, not merely phenotypic Leaves room for discrimination, generalization, change, stability, self-regulation, and victimization Focused on the role of external variables in the regulation of behavior (emphasized contingencies in the environment) Increased focus on the social and psychological environments in which people live Moved rapidly beyond the objective environment into cognitive-symbolic processes, both as vital for social learning

4 Focus on cognition generally and specifically on the role of subjective expectancies, values, and goals and of self-instructions, plans and self-regulatory systems Self-evaluative processes, self-standards, and self-estimates as well View of a person as a cognitive creature with both impressive cognitive competencies and substantial judgmental fallibilities Studied young children s growing understanding of psychological principles underlying social behavior The person variables of special interest are the individual s competencies, encoding strategies, expectancies, values, plans-rules, and self-regulatory systems These theories that we form about behavior are some of the most stable and situation-free constructions o o Stability in complex world May lead us to badly misinfer Cognitive Economics Studies of both clinical judgment and everyday social perception are teaching us more about how the constructs and expectations of the judge and structure interact with whatever data there might be out there in the world of the perceived There are cognitive heuristics through which we go rapidly beyond the information given Studies have shown everyday heuristics of inference may bias the judge to ignore base rates and the reliability of evidence Illusion of validity arises and persists because the factors (sonsistency and extremity of data) that enhance the judge s subjective confidence often are negatively correlated The recognition that people are flooded by information that somehow must be reduced and simplified to allow efficient processing and to avoid an otherwise overwhelming overload Categorizations: are the units essential for any kind of generalization, providing the foundation of efficient information processing and thought

5 tend to highlight the discriminativeness of behavior in relation to changes in the specific psychological situation, focusing on the within-person variance in behavior rather than the mean Reliance on preconceived typologies can potentially encourage attributions of the characteristics associated with a category to each member, even those who don t fit The Return of the Self Carl Rogers - our perception of events, more than their objectively reality, guides how we act George Kelly the same orientation and principles ought to be used in talking about our subjects and about ourselves A person is always capable of constructive alternativism, of creating alternative worlds Alternative ways of seeing and being Personality Psychology must encompass the study of how people s cognitive and behavioral activities, their understandings and actions, interact with the conditions of their lives and shape them emphasize the interdependence of behavior and conditions, mediated by the constructions and cognitive activities of the person who generates them human tendency to invent constructs and to adhere to them and generate subtly discriminative behaviors across settings and over time crucial role or situations and conditions but recognize that they serve as informational inputs whose effects on behavior depends on how they are processed the person s behaviors and expectations change situations and are in return changed by them